Journey to Fully Knowing the Customer

We often find ourselves in a bind today related to having enough, or actually, the correct information about our customers. We want to be highly personal, and we do not want to step over the line but doing that requires a great deal of knowledge.

Today, collecting data and information on our visitors to our sites, to our apps and to our social media platforms is fairly easy. There are also numerous third party entities that are collecting data. But solid knowledge is not something we have full access to right from the beginning. It needs to develop and unfold over time. Personalization – true personalization – often requires ongoing interactions and history. We may get some idea early on about the visitor and their profile, but building a profile over time that is using our data, and not someone else’s data, is the best method of achieving true personalization.

Mobile has been tremendously helpful in building customer profiles, but it has also made the customer more unpredictable. It is very easy for a customer to learn what they want by pulling out their phone and it has also made the customer journey all that much more unpredictable.

Ideally, you would like to know as much about your customer as possible before venturing out, so that you could provide the best customer experience. I completely agree with this thought. Research is important and knowing as much as you can know is always better. But this is also an ideal state, and accurate knowledge out of the gate is not always possible.

One of the points we continue to run into is that mobile and online measurement is hard…not because there is no data (there is actually lots of data), but because it is different than what we have measured in the past, and even more importantly, the visitor’s behavior is radically different here than what we often see on the desktop web and in the analog world. And often, that visitor may change by context or situation. I am not always the same on every social media site and my behavior may be different situationally and contextually given my need at that time.

So this is the bind we find ourselves in: We cannot wait to launch into mobile or refine our web sites until we know all that we want to, because the irony is that we can only fully learn what we want to know by taking action, gradually improving our digital presence, and collecting our own data.

The correlations between an action on a mobile and what follows is not something that is, as of yet, predictable…or at least not as predictable as past behavior indicators would lead us to believe. So, general results, results from our own past customer interactions and the results from other brands may not be reliable indicators of what our audience wants even if we are in the same industry.

That brings us to the point that determining what to measure in mobile is crucial (and here our past information may be helpful on some level, but we need to keep in mind that the usefulness varies by brand and situation) and needs to be the foundation; the starting point is based on what we believe that we know.

Since we do not always know when we start the process what the differences are (even for our brand) between mobile behavior and non-mobile behavior, we need to pick metrics that we believe matter at the very beginning (ideally), start small, make rapid adjustments and be willing to fail fast if need be. This is the real legacy of mobile…it is accelerating the switch from tradition pace marketing to agile pace marketing. No more paralysis by analysis…analysis must be an ongoing activity accompanied by action. If we are successful, great! If we fail, we need to learn what that means and move forward.

The option to not start at all until we have sufficient knowledge is rarely an option, especially since most brands already have some level of mobile presence. The goal needs to be to improve the customer experience from what we thought it should be when we started (yes…hopefully we did start from that premise), and to continue to do that as best we can. Plus, by actually interacting with the customer, this may be the only way that we can actually gain knowledge of what the customer really wants…and how it changes.

So, be agile…

·         Think and Examine (behavior, data and metrics, and qualitative measures)

·         Launch

·         Test and monitor

·         Evaluate and revise

·         And then do it again.

This is actually true (in my opinion) in the entire digital world, but the spontaneity and speed of mobile make it even more compelling. There need to be people in place that are empowered to make adjustments when needed and respond appropriately.